How to Climb
John Long: A Confederacy of Dunces
Navigating Commercial Hoopla On A Bellyful Of Bad Fish
The trip started poorly. At 6 a.m. the previous day, I’d flown from LA to NYC for a meeting with a network VP who was nursing a hangover so grim he could only mumble and barely listened to a word we said. We were in and out of his office in exactly seven minutes. Two hours later, I flew back to LA, snatched a few hours’ sleep, then crawled onto another plane jetting for Palookaville, USA, and a book signing at a trade show. Semiconscious, with three espressos boiling my vitals, I wasn’t two minutes inside the show when a VP for my publisher installed me behind a haystack of books. My mood brightened as a big line formed up. I reminded the VP that his company had prospered on the backs of authors with my cachet and popularity.
“In a pig’s eye,” said the VP. “If we weren’t giving the books away, even your mother wouldn’t line up.”
“Don’t talk about my momma,” I snapped.
Fact is, most everyone at a trade show is on swag alert: Mention free anything (especially over the PA) and it’s like a pack of hyenas spotted Bambi in the veld.
I hate lines, but apparently less so than the 300 people waiting for free books. To reward them for their patience, I tried composing luminous blurbs to folks I’d never met and would never see again.
In five minutes, they were crashing the line, throwing elbows, and yelling things like, “Jeez, dude, you writing another short story or what?” I’d barely gotten the “L” written in “Long” when one guy—only the fourth or fifth person in line—jerked the book away, leaving a big black stripe across the title page. The VP jumped over and said that if I didn’t continue signing the books, half the crowd would try for a refund at the local climbing store. Wanting clean copies, the retailers would return all the books to the publisher, who, in turn, would haul them back for the following year’s trade show, where I could pass them out once more. I felt ludicrous.
Just before the books ran out, “Zeke” introduced himself as a journalist-slashclimber- slash-caver who, naturally, did a bit of creative writing on the side. I cringed as he wrestled a 600-page opus from his daypack, a neo-epic, by his assessment, drawn from his diabolical slitherings in a Kentucky cavern and modeled after Dante’s Inferno, with a touch of Spenser’s Faerie Queen worked in “to caress the female demographic.” I shagged off to the bathroom and never returned, a move that so pissed off the VP he later tossed my expense report in the trash.
Tired and cranky, I was sure to start a fight if I didn’t get some food. The problem solved itself when I found a booth taking orders for what I mistakenly thought was smoked fish. To lure potential customers, the boss—call him Simon Peter—had laid out a two-foot deep-water lunker, and would shave off tiny morsels for any passerby who fancied a taste. But I needed an honest meal, not communion, so when Simon Peter moved off the cutting board to write out an order, I sectioned off the lunker with a cleaver, plopped a hubcap-sized fillet onto a paper plate, and bolted.
Between official business, I spent half my time looking for certain people and the other half dodging others. Whether chasing or fleeing, I beat a regular path up and down a labyrinth of aisles and booths, cramming chunks of that fillet down my cake hole. For a smoked article, that lunker was as flavorless and dry as a Presto- Log. It also expanded terrifically inside my gob, and I could never have gagged it down if not for the beverages I nicked from surrounding booths. But I was a starving man, and in 15 minutes the fish was history.
I pressed on, past towering displays of outdoor merchandise, some so fantastically kooky I wondered how the inventors ever sold enough yak jerky or inflatable skis to rent a booth.
Take the company hawking “collectable” saws and hatchets. Gleaming cutlery covered the booth, and the bossman, a buoyant 300- pounder under a coonskin hat, sounded so much like Porky Pig that folks thought the guy was putting them on. Naturally, I walked straight over to Porky’s booth and started fondling Neptune’s own trident, or something like it. Porky was on me like an ear of corn.
“Ha ... hav ... have you seen our th ... throw ... throwing knives?” asked Porky, whipping out a prodigious shiv, sharp enough to cut an atom. “They make wo ... wonder ... wonderful gi ... gi ... gifts.”
“You must do a tidy business with divorcees,” I said. Just then, I spotted Zeke ambling up the aisle, scanning the landscape, his tome tucked under his arm.
“See that guy walking toward us?” I asked Porky, pointing toward Zeke. “Throw everything you got at him—pikes, battleaxes, the works. Do that, and you got a sale.” I dashed off and ran straight into “Danny,” standing in the middle of the aisle, rigged out in baggy hip-hop gear, his neck freighted with paste bling, arms outstretched in preamble to roaring, “Yo, Largo!”
If ever a rascal could hop up the proceedings, or get us arrested, it was Danny. He’s the only man I’ve ever heard use the words “ain’t” and “supernal” in the same sentence. When Danny goes off, people don’t know if they’re listening to Marcel Proust or Jed Clampett. We exchanged a 50-move handshake, then Danny started going off.
“This gaggle of crackers is killing Danny,” said Danny. “But let’s motate,” he added, pulling me along by the sleeve. “I’m talking ’bout the ne plus ultra of fillies.”
“The who?” I asked, but we were already at our destination, the showy booth of a European ski manufacturer.
“The promised land,” said Danny, thrusting his chin toward the talent posing at the entrance of the booth.
Up on a little stage stood a daffy, shirtless Adonis with what-me-worry detachment and a gallon of “product” in his mane, flanked on his left by Helen of Troy. Helen sported that fetching medley of black downhill-ski boots and a black bikini shrink-wrapped athwart her jutting plantation. Her do, trimmed in a brassy pageboy, was likewise raven black, but her eyes were steel blue, adding a startling touch to her ensemble.